Published German patent application DE 101 39 068 A1 discloses that a sequence of commands for a hierarchically-structured command structure can be generated automatically. For this purpose, a complete set of possible commands is initially generated by storing all possible branches through the individual hierarchical levels as individual commands. Each individual command corresponds to a pathway from the highest to the lowest hierarchical level. The individual commands generated in this manner are then arranged in an arbitrary sequence, in which repetitions of an individual command may also occur.
This sequence of individual commands is then supplied, for example, to a measuring device, which processes the commands successively. If an error occurs in the system during the implementation of a processing run of this kind, the entire sequence of individual commands is systematically shortened in order to determine which chain of individual commands is causative of the system error. The sequence of individual commands is purely arbitrary, and the successively-processed commands are not causally connected. Accordingly, after a new development step of the measuring device, only a complete, new sequence of commands can be generated, within which, once again, a process of localization towards a possible critical sequence takes place.
With the system described, it is not therefore possible to determine the effects of a change to the system with regard to the structure of an individual command. An analysis of a message sent between the individual layers from an end system structured, for example, according to the OSI reference model, is therefore not possible, because messages of this kind are generated only on the basis of a preceding sequence of messages.